The most gut-wrenching moments in the proceedings of federal Parliament over the past decade have been those motions of condolence for Australian soldiers killed in the war in Afghanistan.

Forty of them. Forty too many.

Among the good fortune that has come
Tony Abbott
’s way in the timing of his arrival in the prime ministership, none could be greater than that he is unlikely to have to move such a motion.

Abbott last week made the last of the ritualistic prime ministerial visits to the troops in Afghanistan, to mark the end of Australia’s large-scale combat operations in the war.

He will be the first of the last four prime ministers not to be a wartime prime minister. He will be the first prime minister of the last four to be able to see Australia’s challenges as being bloodless.

At one of the first cabinet meetings of the new government, Abbott and his ministers enjoyed the chance to look north without the uncomfortable distraction of an ongoing, dangerous Australian military involvement in the region.

Abbott has come into office with pretty much a blank cheque on engagement with Asia. His political strategy in opposition – of relentlessly targeting a narrow range of domestic issues that were damaging to the Labor government – allowed little scope for him to spell out his vision of Australia’s future engagement in Asia under a Coalition government.

Abbott said almost nothing about the centrepiece of Labor’s Asia vision, the Australia in the Asian Century white paper. But we now know what he thought of it: one of the first decisions he took was to shut down the Australia in the Asian Century website and send its contents to be stored in the archives of the National Library.

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For Abbott, the Gillard government’s white paper was a hollow exercise in “gesture" politics. It was a document full of motherhood statements and glib rhetoric aimed at impressing an Asian political audience but lacking in substance.

Abbott wants to be an “action" prime minister. He wants to run a government which gets things done – and done well. He believes that a great weakness of Labor was that it was too preoccupied with spin and public relations at the cost of substantial achievements.

Abbott wants the focus of his government’s Asian engagement to be on trade and, specifically, on bringing to a conclusion trade agreement negotiations with China, Japan and South Korea.

While Abbott has had little to say on the subject, he has given a lot of thought to Asian economic engagement and confirmed this by appointing one of his most senior and experienced frontbenchers,
Andrew Robb
, to the trade portfolio. Cabinet endorsed as one of its first decisions Abbott’s brief for Robb – to move heaven and earth to finalise the China, Japan and South Korea trade deals.

Abbott wants all three agreements signed and sealed well before the end of his first term in office. He has told colleagues that this would “put into the shade" Labor’s record of trying to link Australia to the economic opportunities being created by the Asian century.

Abbott says that for all its “Asia century" rhetoric, Labor’s inability to wrap up any of the FTAs with Asia’s economic powerhouses was a serious national failure.

Both the China (commenced in 2005) and Japan (commenced in 2007) trade negotiations were launched by the Howard government. Kevin Rudd launched the South Korean negotiations in 2009.

Despite concerted efforts by then-trade minister
Craig Emerson
and moments of optimism, Labor left office with all three sets of negotiations deadlocked.

‘Deal-breakers’ dumped

Abbott has instructed Robb to bring a much more flexible approach to the negotiations, and Robb is now in the process of seeking responses from each of the Asian giants to new offers.

With total annual trade with China, Japan and South Korea worth more than $250 billion, Abbott believes finalising these agreements would be economic landmarks for the first term of Coalition government, and that going further than Labor was prepared to go to clinch the deals is a price worth paying.

The details of the new offers Robb is putting on the negotiating table have not been disclosed, but Robb has indicated to his Asian counterparts two deal-breakers on which Labor refused to budge are now open for discussion.

The Abbott government is considering offering to South Korea (and probably to Japan) to include in a free trade agreement provisions that would allow their private businesses with investments in Australia to take action in a specially created international tribunal against any decision of the Australian government which is claimed to have damaged that investment. This is the so-called Investor State Dispute Settlement provision, which the Gillard government rejected outright.

A deal with South Korea and Japan on ISDS provisions would provide a precedent that would remove one of the obstacles that have bogged down negotiations on the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade zone. United States business is applying intense pressure to the Obama administration for ISDS provisions to be part of a TPP agreement.

FIRB rules on the table

Robb is also believed to have indicated to China that the government is prepared to accede to its demand for a big lift in the threshold for Chinese investments in Australia being allowed without Foreign Investment Review Board approval, although not for rural land. There are signs that China might accept what is known as a “differentiation" rule for investment in Australia.

The concessions the Abbott government is now putting on the negotiating table will alarm trade policy analysts, especially because it will be argued that the deals will ultimately be of so little economic benefit to Australia that they will amount to the sort of “gesture" policies Abbott says he abhors.

But for Abbott, a trifecta of trade deals with Australia’s biggest trading partners is a political prize that he would use to dramatise the difference between his “can do" government and Labor’s record of failure.

Abbott believes the signatures of Asian leaders on trade agreements will be worth much more than personalised copies of the Asian white paper now sitting, unread, on back shelves of trade ministries in Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul.